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The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. we have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ rump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. shift to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. N has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver, or who knows what her outcome may have been. Dr Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. P gnant women are gestational containers there. Th s analysis is provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
Follow the link to the list of take-aways. While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers. Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid. H can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid! C we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil? A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice everIn a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024
JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.
The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024
The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent
Pecker was a great witness for just that
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/
#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito
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The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. We have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ Trump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer, who is writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. I am shifting to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. CNN has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver. Who knows what her outcome may have been? Dr. Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. Pregnant women are gestational containers there. This analysis was provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
Follow the link to the list of take-aways. While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers. Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid. How can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid! Can we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil? A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice everIn a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024
JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.
The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024
The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent
Pecker was a great witness for just that
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/
#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito
-
The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. we have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ rump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. shift to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. N has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver, or who knows what her outcome may have been. Dr Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. P gnant women are gestational containers there. Th s analysis is provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
Follow the link to the list of take-aways. While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers. Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid. H can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid! C we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil? A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice everIn a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024
JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.
The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024
The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent
Pecker was a great witness for just that
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/
#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito
-
The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. we have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ rump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. shift to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. N has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver, or who knows what her outcome may have been. Dr Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. P gnant women are gestational containers there. Th s analysis is provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
Follow the link to the list of take-aways. While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers. Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid. H can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid! C we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil? A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice everIn a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024
JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.
The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024
The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent
Pecker was a great witness for just that
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/
#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito
-
The Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump’s immunity claim, John Buss, @repeat1968.
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I got the cutest picture of the granddaughters today. The girls were smiling and looking at each other with adoration. Both were pretty in pink. All I can think of is what kind of country they may inherit.
I watched and listened to trials and hearings that were so surreal that I was pretty sure we’d entered the Evil Spock Timeline. I remember when the Supreme Court protected everyone’s rights. Now, rights are confined to those who brought the men there and paid for their holidays. It was like watching a Skeleton Dance. Not one TV Lawyer could find anything constitutional about the show they put on yesterday. We all laughed at him when he said,‘ I Could … Shoot Somebody, And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters’ Evidently, he can do worse than that, and the Supreme Court would make up something to cover his farty, diapered ass.
This is a must-read from Slate: “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us There will be no more self-soothing after this.” This is written by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
For three long years, Supreme Court watchers mollified themselves (and others) with vague promises that when the rubber hit the road, even the ultraconservative Federalist Society justices of the Roberts court would put democracy before party whenever they were finally confronted with the legal effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6. There were promising signs: They had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote). We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.
On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.
However the court disposes of Trump v. U.S., the result will almost certainly be precisely what the former president craves: more delays, more hearings, more appeals—more of everything but justice. This was not a legitimate claim from the start, but a wild attempt by Trump’s attorneys to use his former role as chief executive of the United States to shield himself from the consequences of trying to turn the presidency into a dictatorship. After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends. Just as bad, we heard a constant minimization of Jan. 6, for the second week in a row, as if the insurrection were ancient history, and history that has since been dramatically overblown, presumably for Democrats’ partisan aims.
All this with the husband of an insurrectionist sitting on the bench. I heard Nicole Wallace give the best explanation of anything I’ve heard on why these men act out their grievances in court decisions last night. Two of the guys that sit on the bench are sex pests and were publicly shown to be so. Alito is just perpetually mad at everything but mostly at being branded a bigot because he has issues with women and gay people. His hateful take on religion basically focuses on controlling the objects of his hatred. Protecting his religious practice means he should get away with whatever. Nicole Wallace argued that they love Trump because they are all angry and aggrieved. They identify with Trump because they feel they’re in a similar situation. Civil rights are all about not letting white boys be white boys. They all want absolute immunity. we have to rely on Amy and John to be reasonable. Amy’s line of questions actually gave me a bit of hope.
It’s a weird timeline for me to quote Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger. This is from the Bulwark. “ rump Melts Institutions, SCOTUS Edition. The Supreme Court’s no-win situation and the healthy liberalism we need.”
… reading the tea leaves of oral arguments is always an exercise in guesswork. Hopefully SCOTUS won’t be long in unveiling their opinion on the matter.
But one other thing is worth saying: It’s completely understandable that so many people’s first instinct was to roll their eyes at the Court’s apparent interest in using this case to trace out the complex contours of any newly explicit presidential right to official-act immunity—given the remarkable hubris of Trump’s bringing those arguments in the first place.
After all, here’s a guy who, during his second impeachment, explicitly arguedthat prosecuting an ex-president was the role of the criminal courts: “a president who left office is not in any way above the law,” his lawyers argued, “as the Constitution states he or she is like any other citizen and can be tried in a court of law.”
Now Trump articulates just the opposite position: No act that is “official” in form—which, his lawyers have had to admit during arguments, would include such acts as ordering the military to carry out a coup—can be criminally prosecuted after he leaves office unless he was first convicted in an impeachment trial for that conduct. How any president enjoying such expansive power could ever be impeached by a Congress he could apparently order murdered without consequence remains unclear.
It’s a ridiculous exercise, a transparent stalling tactic. For Team Trump, just getting the argument in front of SCOTUS was a victory in and of itself, further diminishing the odds of a jury getting to rule on Trump’s stolen-election charges before the November election. “Literally popping champagne right now,” one lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stonewhen the court announced it would consider the immunity claim in February. This week, RS quoted another Trump source that it hardly matters what the court does now: “We already pulled off the heist.”
At the same time, no matter how transparent Trump’s run-out-the-clock motivations in bringing the petition to the Court, it’s true that the claims of presidential immunity at hand have never been litigated. The justices are highly unlikely to endorse Trump’s theory that every presidential act that is official “in form” is exempt from prosecution—but are some presidential acts immune? What is the line between a president acting in his capacity as president and acting in his capacity as a candidate or private citizen? And could it be true—as Trump’s lawyers have argued—that opening up too broad a swath of presidential actions to post-presidency prosecution could hamper a president’s ability to run the country effectively?
Evidently, Kavanaugh’s love of beer causes him to be delusional and totally out of it.
Kavanaugh: President Ford's pardon of Nixon, very controversial in the moment…. Now looked upon as one of the better decisions in presidential history I think by most people. pic.twitter.com/YaB0Px4v25
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 25, 2024
One last SCOTUS send-up and I’m changing the topic. This is from Adam Sewer writing for The New Republic. ” The Trumpification of the Supreme Court. The conservative justices have shown they are ready to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.”
The notion that Donald Trump’s supporters believe that he should be able to overthrow the government and get away with it sounds like hyperbole, an absurd and uncharitable caricature of conservative thought. Except that is exactly what Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued before the Supreme Court yesterday, taking the position that former presidents have “absolute immunity” for so-called official acts they take in office.
“How about if a president orders the military to stage a coup?” Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer. “I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act,” Sauer said after a brief exchange. “If it were an official act … he would have to be impeached and convicted.”
“That sure sounds bad, doesn’t it?” Kagan replied later.
The Democratic appointees on the bench sought to illustrate the inherent absurdity of this argument with other scenarios as well—Kagan got Sauer to admit that the president could share nuclear secrets, while Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented a scenario in which a president orders the military to assassinate a political rival. Sauer said that might qualify as an official act too. It was the only way to maintain the logic of his argument, which is that Trump is above the law
This Mike Luchovich cartoon is brutal and true. shift to the other SCOTUS shit show this week. N has “Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over emergency abortions.” Again, thank goodness my youngest daughter is in Denver, or who knows what her outcome may have been. Dr Daughter is getting more colleagues in Washington State because of Idaho. P gnant women are gestational containers there. Th s analysis is provided by Tierney Sneed and John Fritze.
Follow the link to the list of take-aways. While that craziness was going on in the District, we continued to be treated to the life and times of Tabloid targets and publishers. Every time I tune into anything dealing with Trump, I feel like someone slipped me the brown acid. H can one malevolent man be so universally dangerous and disruptive? Especially one so incredibly stupid! C we have a debate on who is more genuinely evil? A to or Trump? Thomas is a stooge. Kavanaugh is a wingman. Gorsuch certainly is in the running for evil, but not the way Alito does it. Robarts is out of his league and likely to go down in shame as history judges him the least effective Chief Justice everIn a Supreme Court hearing on the Biden administration’s challenge to aspects of Idaho’s strict abortion ban, US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar sought to appeal to conservative justices who just two years ago ruled that states should have the ability to prohibit the procedure.
The dispute, stemming from the Justice Department’s marquee response to the high court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, turns on whether federal mandates for hospital emergency room care override abortion bans that do not exempt situations where a woman’s health is in danger but her life is not yet threatened.
To prevail, the Biden administration will need the votes of two members of the court’s conservative bloc, and with Justice Brett Kavanaugh signaling sympathies toward Idaho, the case will likely come down to the votes of Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett. The two justices had tough questions for both sides of the case.
The court’s far-right wing, perhaps in an attempt to keep those two justices on their side, framed the case as a federal overreach into state power. The court’s liberals, meanwhile, focused on the grisly details of medical emergencies faced by pregnant woman that were not covered by the limited life-of-the-woman exemption in Idaho’s ban.
So, back to Pecker and the man who has to pay for sex coming and going. There’s been a whole of objecting accompanied by “sustained.”
recross: Trump cares about his family and so was worried about these types of stories, right?
objection
sustained
End of Pecker testimony— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) April 26, 2024
JUST NOW: During his cross of Pecker, Trump's defense attorney, Emil Bove, has been repeatedly referring to Trump as "President Trump" when referencing periods of time when Trump was not in office.
The DA's office keeps objecting and Judge Merchan keeps sustaining those…
— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) April 26, 2024
The prosecution needs to build a bridge for the jury into Trump's mind that establishes his intent
Pecker was a great witness for just that
I discussed that & what to expect when the next witness takes the stand @CNN @questCNN @OmarJimenez pic.twitter.com/ozKxHydNHS— Norm Eisen (#TryingTrump out now!) (@NormEisen) April 26, 2024
More will be coming once the print journalists get their stories in. I wish I could be Pollyanna and play the glad game, but I can only come up with the bad news. We get to see this continually, which is also the thing I’m glad about. I m feel like a total masochist every time I turn the TV on or read a magazine article, but just think how awful it would be if we didn’t know about this. I’m not sure what will become of Donald, but I’m certain that we still have time to make certain he doesn’t get back into the White House. We have time to stop the MAGAdons that want to clone that agenda into every state and the U.S. Congress. We’ll see and read nothing else but propaganda if we don’t stop them now.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Guess who John Prine wrote this about?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/04/26/funereal-friday-reads-life-as-a-dank-meme/
#PresidentialImmunity_ #Repeat1968 #EmergencyPregnancyHealthCare #JohnBuss #SCOTUS #TheCaravanOfFools #TheEvilTwinsDonaldAndAlito
-
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S3E07 & 08
I‘m a bit later for #CelebrateDiscoReWatch this week than usual. But I‘m all finished watching and up to date now.
———
S3E07 Unification III
🖖 Michael and Book ❤️❤️
🖖 USS Yelchin 😭
🖖 Great conversation between Tilly and Michael.
🖖 Michael‘s look when she heard „Ambassador Spock“. 😊
🖖 That smile on Vance‘s face. Not only did he realise that Michael as Spock‘s sister was of great value in this situation. I think for the first time he acknowledges her value as a Starfleet officer with her persisting on what she thinks is the right thing to do. (At least that‘s my head canon now.)
🖖 😭 Spock! 😭
🖖 T‘Rina‘s dress is beautiful! I especially love the collar and the undershirt.
🖖 I really like the Qowat Milat. I want more stories with them. Books. There should be books.
🖖 Dr. B‘s clothes are cool too.
🖖 I love the talk between Tilly and Stamets in the spore chamber. 😆
🖖 I like the solution to the discussion, that Michael takes back her request in order to protect the still very fragile peace on Ni‘var.
🖖 „You know where to find me.“ 😭
🖖 So great how the bridge crew support Tilly. No infighting in Starfleet. (Except when Riker is involved. 🤣) It reminds me of the episode of Lower Decks where Rutherford tries to change divisions so he could spend time with Tendi. Everybody was cheering him on. I love that!
🖖 The budding romance between T‘Rina and Saru is so visible and sweet. I can‘t wait for season 5!
———
S3E08 Sanctuary
🖖 Culber is too cool for Georgiou. 😂
🖖 Ossyra is definitely bad news. I like her hair cut.
🖖 I am not a fan of the layer of latex (or whatever) on the Orion actors‘ faces though. It looks wrong.
🖖 Poor Linus. Always something with him.
🖖 Adira ❤️
🖖 Georgiou in the med bay is hilarious!
🖖 I love how Stamets is tending to Adira.
🖖 Detmer!!! 💪
🖖 Tilly went full XO/ personal assistant. Loved that.
🖖 Another classic Trek story. Never the worst of stories.
🖖 I did not remember that season being so episodic. I like it.
———
#StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery #CelebrateDisco2024 -
CW: Star Trek: Discovery - Short Treks season 2 (minus Ephraim and Dot and The Girl Who Made the Stars)
#CelebrateDiscoReWatch time. Today: Short Treks season 2.
I had not yet seen any of the second batch of Short Treks, so I was very excited to finally watch them.
———
S2E01 Q&A
🖖 Fun opening credits.
🖖 Smiling Spock is super cute.
🖖 His wig however is not.
🖖 LOL Oh god! Yeah, let‘s better not think too hard about the prime directive. Again: Love the meta commentary of Disco. But I agree with Spock.
🖖 Rebecca Romijn and Number One are both great. I am so happy about SNW.
🖖 Great first look at what we later learn about Una, culminating, as I would say, in her song „Keeping Secrets“ in Subspace Rhapsody.
🖖 Speaking of Subspace Rhapsody. It‘s said that Ethan Peck doesn‘t (like to) sing. But man, he‘s doing it quite a bit on Star Trek. 😁
———
S2E02 The Trouble with Edward
🖖 What was that? 🤣
🖖 It‘s Archer in Space, that‘s what. 🤣
🖖 I love Archer, btw.
🖖 That Captain was cool. Can we have more of her, please?
🖖 So… uhm… I am a bit torn on this one. It‘s so silly. I mean, the way the Tribbles give birth, that big vacuum cleaner, Edward in his undies in the corridor. That‘s hilarious. But also very very weird.
🖖 Great opening credits again.
———
S2E03 Ask Not
🖖 Holy ish! Great cadet. Can we see more of her too, please???
🖖 Reminded me of the test Wesley had to get through as part of his application to Starfleet Academy.
🖖 I‘m not a fan of such tests, though.
🖖 Isn’t Kalinda Vasquez the writer wo got commissioned to write a Trek movie script after that? What ever happened with that I wonder?
———
S2E06 Children of Mars
🖖 MORE DAVID BOWIE IN TREK! I‘M FREAKING OUT!!
🖖 Wow! That one was great! 😢
🖖 I loved that there wasn‘t a lot of talking, but most was overlayed with that amazing cover of „Heroes“.
🖖 Teen problems will always be the same, won‘t they.
🖖 Great actresses.
🖖 I really liked the alien design.
———
Unfortunately I can‘t watch the two animated Short Treks at the moment, as P+ gives me a 404 for both of them. I also think they are wrongly titled. German Trekkies, do you have the same problem with them? I might have to write an essay-mail and ask what‘s up there.
(Edit: Sorry for the many edits. So many typos! I didn't do a good job in proof reading this.)
———
#StarTrek #StarTrekShortTreks #StarTrekDiscovery (kind of) #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds (kind of) -
'Star Trek Discovery' at season 2 finale.
General thoughts. Both good and bad.
Discovery-
Makes space seem very real, unlike any other series before it or since. And I find that exciting.
Is full of lux production design, but goes a little too hard on the lens flare aesthetic.
Does the react face montage for WAY too long. We do not need to see the react face of every person on the ship.
Is deeply confused about costuming. But still manages to make all the costumes very cool. Big ups to the person who went for primary coloir sparkle space suits for the pod flight in 'Brother' S02E01. Everything!
Is a little bit too confused about its non humans.
Is quite heavy on the feels. As such it doesn't read like the Star Fleet culture I'm used to. But given this is set in a very action heavy period of the Federation-Klingon War, followed by whatever this is in order to get the ship and crew to what seems like a place they should have been since the first season and never part of the war, I suppose there will be less opera and other personal hobbies. Random singing performances so far are greatly appreciated.
Has a complete lack of chemistry between its lead and her love interest, who also embodied the most convoluted and wasted plot thread of the series.
Has Michelle Yeoh.
Has awesome gay couple!
Has Micheal Brunham monologue far too often.
Will hopefully move well past its Sarek-Spock legitimacy leanings in season 3.
Has Jett Reno. And thank the gods for her.#Discovery #StarTrek #DISCO #MichelleYeoh #JettReno #TigNotaro
-
'Star Trek Discovery' at season 2 finale.
General thoughts. Both good and bad.
Discovery-
Makes space seem very real, unlike any other series before it or since. And I find that exciting.
Is full of lux production design, but goes a little too hard on the lens flare aesthetic.
Does the react face montage for WAY too long. We do not need to see the react face of every person on the ship.
Is deeply confused about costuming. But still manages to make all the costumes very cool. Big ups to the person who went for primary coloir sparkle space suits for the pod flight in 'Brother' S02E01. Everything!
Is a little bit too confused about its non humans.
Is quite heavy on the feels. As such it doesn't read like the Star Fleet culture I'm used to. But given this is set in a very action heavy period of the Federation-Klingon War, followed by whatever this is in order to get the ship and crew to what seems like a place they should have been since the first season and never part of the war, I suppose there will be less opera and other personal hobbies. Random singing performances so far are greatly appreciated.
Has a complete lack of chemistry between its lead and her love interest, who also embodied the most convoluted and wasted plot thread of the series.
Has Michelle Yeoh.
Has awesome gay couple!
Has Micheal Brunham monologue far too often.
Will hopefully move well past its Sarek-Spock legitimacy leanings in season 3.
Has Jett Reno. And thank the gods for her.#Discovery #StarTrek #DISCO #MichelleYeoh #JettReno #TigNotaro
-
'Star Trek Discovery' at season 2 finale.
General thoughts. Both good and bad.
Discovery-
Makes space seem very real, unlike any other series before it or since. And I find that exciting.
Is full of lux production design, but goes a little too hard on the lens flare aesthetic.
Does the react face montage for WAY too long. We do not need to see the react face of every person on the ship.
Is deeply confused about costuming. But still manages to make all the costumes very cool. Big ups to the person who went for primary coloir sparkle space suits for the pod flight in 'Brother' S02E01. Everything!
Is a little bit too confused about its non humans.
Is quite heavy on the feels. As such it doesn't read like the Star Fleet culture I'm used to. But given this is set in a very action heavy period of the Federation-Klingon War, followed by whatever this is in order to get the ship and crew to what seems like a place they should have been since the first season and never part of the war, I suppose there will be less opera and other personal hobbies. Random singing performances so far are greatly appreciated.
Has a complete lack of chemistry between its lead and her love interest, who also embodied the most convoluted and wasted plot thread of the series.
Has Michelle Yeoh.
Has awesome gay couple!
Has Micheal Brunham monologue far too often.
Will hopefully move well past its Sarek-Spock legitimacy leanings in season 3.
Has Jett Reno. And thank the gods for her.#Discovery #StarTrek #DISCO #MichelleYeoh #JettReno #TigNotaro
-
'Star Trek Discovery' at season 2 finale.
General thoughts. Both good and bad.
Discovery-
Makes space seem very real, unlike any other series before it or since. And I find that exciting.
Is full of lux production design, but goes a little too hard on the lens flare aesthetic.
Does the react face montage for WAY too long. We do not need to see the react face of every person on the ship.
Is deeply confused about costuming. But still manages to make all the costumes very cool. Big ups to the person who went for primary coloir sparkle space suits for the pod flight in 'Brother' S02E01. Everything!
Is a little bit too confused about its non humans.
Is quite heavy on the feels. As such it doesn't read like the Star Fleet culture I'm used to. But given this is set in a very action heavy period of the Federation-Klingon War, followed by whatever this is in order to get the ship and crew to what seems like a place they should have been since the first season and never part of the war, I suppose there will be less opera and other personal hobbies. Random singing performances so far are greatly appreciated.
Has a complete lack of chemistry between its lead and her love interest, who also embodied the most convoluted and wasted plot thread of the series.
Has Michelle Yeoh.
Has awesome gay couple!
Has Micheal Brunham monologue far too often.
Will hopefully move well past its Sarek-Spock legitimacy leanings in season 3.
Has Jett Reno. And thank the gods for her.#Discovery #StarTrek #DISCO #MichelleYeoh #JettReno #TigNotaro
-
'Star Trek Discovery' at season 2 finale.
General thoughts. Both good and bad.
Discovery-
Makes space seem very real, unlike any other series before it or since. And I find that exciting.
Is full of lux production design, but goes a little too hard on the lens flare aesthetic.
Does the react face montage for WAY too long. We do not need to see the react face of every person on the ship.
Is deeply confused about costuming. But still manages to make all the costumes very cool. Big ups to the person who went for primary coloir sparkle space suits for the pod flight in 'Brother' S02E01. Everything!
Is a little bit too confused about its non humans.
Is quite heavy on the feels. As such it doesn't read like the Star Fleet culture I'm used to. But given this is set in a very action heavy period of the Federation-Klingon War, followed by whatever this is in order to get the ship and crew to what seems like a place they should have been since the first season and never part of the war, I suppose there will be less opera and other personal hobbies. Random singing performances so far are greatly appreciated.
Has a complete lack of chemistry between its lead and her love interest, who also embodied the most convoluted and wasted plot thread of the series.
Has Michelle Yeoh.
Has awesome gay couple!
Has Micheal Brunham monologue far too often.
Will hopefully move well past its Sarek-Spock legitimacy leanings in season 3.
Has Jett Reno. And thank the gods for her.#Discovery #StarTrek #DISCO #MichelleYeoh #JettReno #TigNotaro
-
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S2E04 & 05
It’s Sunday and you know what that means… 🪩 #CelebrateDiscoReWatch day! 🪩
———
S2E04 An Obol for Charon
🖖 Number One, hello!
🖖 The food synthesizer doesn‘t say anything to Una? It obviously likes burgers and fries. 🍔🍟
🖖 The bridge crew sharing some time around the table was nice. Linus is cute.
🖖 Reno and Stamets are a fantastic pair! More please!
🖖 When did Saru and Michael become such close friends? What did I miss or forget?
🖖 David Bowie is canon. I don‘t care for anything else from now on. 👩🎤
🖖 All the bridge crew standing up for Saru 😭
🖖 Saru‘s quarters are an absolute dream place.
🖖 The science lab has turned into a very surreal place and I love that. Great scenes!
———
S2E05 The Saints of Imperfection
🖖 Great visuals of the torpedo heading towards the shuttle.
🖖 That… is not Spock. 😆
🖖 Georgiou is enjoying every second of this. And so do I.
🖖 Mary Wiseman!! 🤩
🖖 Ash! ❤️ Looking quite fetching today.
🖖 I like the visual of the Discovery sinking into an ocean. Great vfx all around. The mycelial network looks super good too. 😍
🖖 Hugh! ❤️ 😭
🖖 Pike, stop being so rude to Ash!
🖖 The admiral rebuking Leland and Pike 🤣
🖖 Good bye, May. You were cool.
———
#CelebrateDisco2023 #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery -
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S2E04 & 05
It’s Sunday and you know what that means… 🪩 #CelebrateDiscoReWatch day! 🪩
———
S2E04 An Obol for Charon
🖖 Number One, hello!
🖖 The food synthesizer doesn‘t say anything to Una? It obviously likes burgers and fries. 🍔🍟
🖖 The bridge crew sharing some time around the table was nice. Linus is cute.
🖖 Reno and Stamets are a fantastic pair! More please!
🖖 When did Saru and Michael become such close friends? What did I miss or forget?
🖖 David Bowie is canon. I don‘t care for anything else from now on. 👩🎤
🖖 All the bridge crew standing up for Saru 😭
🖖 Saru‘s quarters are an absolute dream place.
🖖 The science lab has turned into a very surreal place and I love that. Great scenes!
———
S2E05 The Saints of Imperfection
🖖 Great visuals of the torpedo heading towards the shuttle.
🖖 That… is not Spock. 😆
🖖 Georgiou is enjoying every second of this. And so do I.
🖖 Mary Wiseman!! 🤩
🖖 Ash! ❤️ Looking quite fetching today.
🖖 I like the visual of the Discovery sinking into an ocean. Great vfx all around. The mycelial network looks super good too. 😍
🖖 Hugh! ❤️ 😭
🖖 Pike, stop being so rude to Ash!
🖖 The admiral rebuking Leland and Pike 🤣
🖖 Good bye, May. You were cool.
———
#CelebrateDisco2023 #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery -
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S2E04 & 05
It’s Sunday and you know what that means… 🪩 #CelebrateDiscoReWatch day! 🪩
———
S2E04 An Obol for Charon
🖖 Number One, hello!
🖖 The food synthesizer doesn‘t say anything to Una? It obviously likes burgers and fries. 🍔🍟
🖖 The bridge crew sharing some time around the table was nice. Linus is cute.
🖖 Reno and Stamets are a fantastic pair! More please!
🖖 When did Saru and Michael become such close friends? What did I miss or forget?
🖖 David Bowie is canon. I don‘t care for anything else from now on. 👩🎤
🖖 All the bridge crew standing up for Saru 😭
🖖 Saru‘s quarters are an absolute dream place.
🖖 The science lab has turned into a very surreal place and I love that. Great scenes!
———
S2E05 The Saints of Imperfection
🖖 Great visuals of the torpedo heading towards the shuttle.
🖖 That… is not Spock. 😆
🖖 Georgiou is enjoying every second of this. And so do I.
🖖 Mary Wiseman!! 🤩
🖖 Ash! ❤️ Looking quite fetching today.
🖖 I like the visual of the Discovery sinking into an ocean. Great vfx all around. The mycelial network looks super good too. 😍
🖖 Hugh! ❤️ 😭
🖖 Pike, stop being so rude to Ash!
🖖 The admiral rebuking Leland and Pike 🤣
🖖 Good bye, May. You were cool.
———
#CelebrateDisco2023 #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery -
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S2E04 & 05
It’s Sunday and you know what that means… 🪩 #CelebrateDiscoReWatch day! 🪩
———
S2E04 An Obol for Charon
🖖 Number One, hello!
🖖 The food synthesizer doesn‘t say anything to Una? It obviously likes burgers and fries. 🍔🍟
🖖 The bridge crew sharing some time around the table was nice. Linus is cute.
🖖 Reno and Stamets are a fantastic pair! More please!
🖖 When did Saru and Michael become such close friends? What did I miss or forget?
🖖 David Bowie is canon. I don‘t care for anything else from now on. 👩🎤
🖖 All the bridge crew standing up for Saru 😭
🖖 Saru‘s quarters are an absolute dream place.
🖖 The science lab has turned into a very surreal place and I love that. Great scenes!
———
S2E05 The Saints of Imperfection
🖖 Great visuals of the torpedo heading towards the shuttle.
🖖 That… is not Spock. 😆
🖖 Georgiou is enjoying every second of this. And so do I.
🖖 Mary Wiseman!! 🤩
🖖 Ash! ❤️ Looking quite fetching today.
🖖 I like the visual of the Discovery sinking into an ocean. Great vfx all around. The mycelial network looks super good too. 😍
🖖 Hugh! ❤️ 😭
🖖 Pike, stop being so rude to Ash!
🖖 The admiral rebuking Leland and Pike 🤣
🖖 Good bye, May. You were cool.
———
#CelebrateDisco2023 #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery -
CW: Star Trek: Discovery S2E04 & 05
It’s Sunday and you know what that means… 🪩 #CelebrateDiscoReWatch day! 🪩
———
S2E04 An Obol for Charon
🖖 Number One, hello!
🖖 The food synthesizer doesn‘t say anything to Una? It obviously likes burgers and fries. 🍔🍟
🖖 The bridge crew sharing some time around the table was nice. Linus is cute.
🖖 Reno and Stamets are a fantastic pair! More please!
🖖 When did Saru and Michael become such close friends? What did I miss or forget?
🖖 David Bowie is canon. I don‘t care for anything else from now on. 👩🎤
🖖 All the bridge crew standing up for Saru 😭
🖖 Saru‘s quarters are an absolute dream place.
🖖 The science lab has turned into a very surreal place and I love that. Great scenes!
———
S2E05 The Saints of Imperfection
🖖 Great visuals of the torpedo heading towards the shuttle.
🖖 That… is not Spock. 😆
🖖 Georgiou is enjoying every second of this. And so do I.
🖖 Mary Wiseman!! 🤩
🖖 Ash! ❤️ Looking quite fetching today.
🖖 I like the visual of the Discovery sinking into an ocean. Great vfx all around. The mycelial network looks super good too. 😍
🖖 Hugh! ❤️ 😭
🖖 Pike, stop being so rude to Ash!
🖖 The admiral rebuking Leland and Pike 🤣
🖖 Good bye, May. You were cool.
———
#CelebrateDisco2023 #StarTrek #StarTrekDiscovery -
Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Retired Horticulturalist Mel Lumby: In Her Own Words
The beautiful begonias of Borneo and beyond deserve our love and protection
Bio: Mel Lumby
Hello, I’m Melody Lumby from the US state of Oregon. Throughout my career and life (over 50 years) I have been a passionate devotee of plants and a horticulturalist. Prior to retiring, I was a horticultural buyer for a retail nursery business and a lab technician in a horticultural laboratory, testing soil amendments and soil media for quality assurance.
I have always loved Begonias. I have loved them since falling for them at age 16 when I joined the American Begonia Society in Portland, Oregon – I am still a member!
When I first joined, it was me and a bevvy of sweet grannies and together we gathered to discuss and marvel over these plants.
Now after 50 years of living with, working with and loving begonias – I’m the one with the grey hair!
I’ve seen begonias go in and out of fashion over this time.
“Oh, yes. Begonias are a little old lady plant,” they used to say….now look at them!
Begonias are no longer citizens of Dorkville. They are coveted and collected by the hip and ‘planty’
Begonias are greatly coveted by hobbyists and are shown off on social media by hip and ‘planty’ enthusiasts.
I used to pay around $3.99 USD for certain begonias. Now? Some folks will pay $399 USD for unusual and desirable species of Begonia. Sometimes it can be even more expensive than that.
Begonias have been with me through the decades, a lovely silent friend to come home to after work, during life’s trials and joys, a beautiful accompaniment to a happy life.
~ Mel Lumby
Hidden in the jungles of SE Asia, scientists estimate that there are undiscovered begonia species to the tune of three to five hundred new species on Papua New Guinea. They occupy shady forest floors and limestone cliffs, without any name given by human kind. Horticultural commerce hasn’t had a glimpse of them yet.
On Borneo, it is estimated that 400 possibly even more species of Begonia exist – primarily in the under surveyed Kalimantan district.
Begonias, along with orangutans and many other rainforest inhabitants are in danger now. Will these precious jewels of the jungle be located by scientists, described, eventually named and shared, so that people can love and marvel at their incredible beauty? Or will the bulldozer get there first, destroying where they live, making way to plant oil palm plantations for cheap palm oil?
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)Come on an enchanting and curious journey into of the world’s most beautiful, medicinal and endangered plants of the rainforest: #Begonias with retired horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil
Will exquisite #begonias become historical relics…no longer found in real life #rainforests? Not if Begonia lover Mel Lumby @Norska11 has anything to do with it! Help her fight for rare plants #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
Download image Download printable PDF View interactive HTMLBeautiful #begonias are the unsung heroes of #rainforests. Their supreme beauty dazzles us. Their medicine protects us. Yet #corporate greed threatens them. By Horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
We buy inexpensive products that contain palm oil now. It is a cheap, useful, oil that manufacturers like to use. Cookies, crackers, frozen pizza, shampoo, face lotion.
We buy these products without realising that we are contributing to rainforest destruction. Those rainforest shady places where beautiful Begonias grow are vulnerable to deforestation for palmoil.
“We are destroying swathes of rainforest containing beautiful, jewel-like, treasures. I cannot sit by quietly, while our beautiful earth burns. I must act!”
Mel Lumby on Instagram: More begonias being carefully, lovingly grownMel Lumby’s Begonia moysesii in bloom Mel Lumby’s Instagram: Evey Big Buff and Eloise Little Miss, two of my buddies hanging out in the garden bed.“I thought that I would quietly retire at the beach, grow a flower garden and happily live out my days with my chickens. I have done this. But I cannot be silent. I am now adding my voice to many others who are trying to save the animals and plants we love from mass extinction. I am only one person, but I can do something.”
Mel lumby
Photos: Mel Lumby on Instagram @spock_like_object
“I am able to help fight against the greed of palm oil. This feels so good!”
Palm Oil and Pollution by Jo FrederiksThis issue has been on my mind for quite some time now.
It really bothers me that there are beautiful undiscovered begonias that took millions of years to evolve.
We won’t even get to know about them because of dumb old palm oil!
Nobody even asked for this in our food, etc. The Palm Oil Detectives gal is really a cool person – it is an honour to try to help her.
~ Mel Lumby
Deforestation for agriculture is a clear and present threat to tropical rainforests. Especially in Indonesia and Malaysia, economic growth has come at an enormous cost to its unique plants, wild animals and indigenous peoples.
In Indonesia, 10 million hectares of primary forest was lost over the past two decades. A 2019 study identified palm oil plantations to be responsible for 23% (the single largest proportion) of the deforestation in Indonesia between 2001 and 2016.
Over 3 million hectares of the forest estate in 2019 were allocated to palm oil production, which was in strict violation of national forestry law.
It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying to see. Now palm oil threatens plants, animals and indigenous peoples in South America, India, Papua and Africa as well.
Learn how to helpFast facts about Borneo & plant diversity
Borneo is home to more than 15,000 plant species
A diversity that rivals the African continent. This may be the highest number of plants of any region on Earth.
- There are 931 Begonia species in Southeast Asia
- Currently, there are 216 species and one subspecies of Begonia in Borneo.
- In Sarawak alone there are 96 species, with an average of at least 10 species described per year over the past 7 years.
- In Borneo, there are also 3,000 species of trees, 1,700 species of orchids and 50 carnivorous pitcher plant species.
The natural habitat of begonias is cool, moist forests and tropical rainforests, but some begonias are adapted to drier climates
[Pictured] Begonia socotrana grows in between the shady cracks in rock formations on the arid island of Socotra, Yemen.
Fast facts about the family Begoniaceae
They grow in the deeply shaded forest understory from the lowlands to mountain tops and on all rock types including granite, limestone, sandstone and ultramafic rocks.
A Guide to Begonias of Borneo by Ruth Kiew et. al.
- The Begonia was named after a French botanist in the 17th century.
- There are over 2,000 known species of family Begoniaceae – one of the largest genera of flowering plants. New species are being discovered almost on a monthly basis.
- They are mostly terrestrial and are either herbs or undershrubs, but occasionally may be grown from air (ephiphytic).
- They thrive in moist tropical and subtropical climates of South and Central America, Africa and southern Asia.
- Their leaves are often large, vividly marked and are they are assymetrical and unequal-sided, giving each plant unique beauty.
- They are popular ornamental plants for conservatories. Currently, begonias are incredibly trendy and are coveted and admired by house plant lovers all over the world.
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)
The world’s tiniest begonia was recently discovered Begonia elachista.
They exist at the mouth of a limestone cave in central Peru and nowhere else in the world.
Then there is a newly described giant begonia from Tibet, tall enough to tower over a person: Begonia giganticaulis.
The pretty Florist’s Reiger Begonia comes in a fantastic array of colours including pinks, peaches, oranges, reds, yellows, white.
We cannot forget the lovely tuberous begonias that we plant in the shady reaches of our yards.
To plant large flowerbeds full of Wax begonias in summertime is a sheer delight.
During drought periods, Begonia socotrana drop their pretty, round, leaves and survive as a tuber.
Many years ago, Begonia socotrana was used as one of the parent plants to eventually create Florist’s Reiger Begonia mentioned above.
Mel Lumby
Exceptionally beautiful begonia paintings from history
Those lovely plants are there, for now, surrounded by tropical bird call and orangutan hoots. They often live in very small stretches of area, sometimes only existing on one hillside and nowhere else in the world. Plants can’t run away if that bulldozer comes, they are sessile, fixed in one place.
If a bulldozer razes everything and scrapes that Begonia inhabited hillside bare, that’s it – that particular begonia will be lost, gone forever from our earth in the wild. Millions of years of evolution, gone. All that beauty, gone.
Mel Lumby
[Pictured] ‘Diversity of Species in the Rainforest by Oro Verde – the Rainforest Foundation (2009).
Scientists are constantly discovering new Begonia species in Indonesia
Indonesia has one of the largest concentrations of of begonia species diversity, especially in Southeast Asia with 243 species. In 2022 alone, at least a dozen new species were discovered, here in this article below, seven are mentioned.
- Hoya batutikarensis
- Hoya buntokensis
- Dendrobium dedeksantosoi
- Rigiolepis argentii
- Begonia robii
- Begonia willemii
- Etlingera comosa
Read the full story: ‘Indonesian researchers discover seven new species of ornamental plants,’ Indonesian Window.
Indonesia is an archipelago consisting of approximately 17,508 islands and is covered by tropical rain forest, seasonal forest, mountain vegetation, subalpine shrub vegetation, swamp and coastal vegetation. With its reflective mixture of Asian and Australian native species,
Indonesia is said to possess the second largest biodiversity
in the world, with around 40,000 endemic plant species
including 6,000 medicinal plantsNugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
We may be losing plants with medicinal purposes and cures as yet unknown which will help humankind
If we bulldoze Borneo, plow down Papua New Guinea, annihilate the Amazon, we wipe out incredibly beautiful plants that haven’t yet been discovered!
It isn’t just Begonias. It’s orchids and all sorts of fascinating tropical plant species. Nepenthes, the pitcher plant species. Aroids – the wonderful Philodendron relatives of Begonias that are also popular now.
Mel Lumby
Newly discovered Begonia medicinalis has cancer-fighting properties
Begonia medicinalis was discovered only recently in 2019 by scientists. This incredible species of begonia native to Sulawesi has been used as a medicinal plant by Indigenous peoples for 1000’s of years. Now this plant has been shown to have the potential to fight cancer!
Begonia medicinalis is known as benalu batu in Bahasa Indonesia is a herbal plant that is locally used for traditional medicines. The secondary metabolites such as flavonoids, alkaloids, steroids, and terpenoids have been reported to be found in these plant extracts. The content of flavonoids can lead to anti-cancer abilities while heat-sensitive flavonoid compounds can be extracted by the Ultrasound-assisted Extraction (UAE) method.
In this study, the anticancer potential of B. medicinalis extracts from the leaves (leaves extract/LE) and stem (stem extract/SE) in three cell lines (Hela, MDA-MB, HT-29) have been performed.
The anticancer potential was obtained from cytotoxic measurements by the MTT method on 3 types of cancer cells incubated with the extract for 24 hours. The value of total flavonoid content (TFC) in the LE was higher than that of SE extracts. Both extracts have the potential as a remedy for the treatment of cancer.
Prihardina & S Fatmawati; (2021); ‘Cytotoxicity of Begonia medicinalis aqueous extract in three cancer cell line,’: IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 913 012084. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/913/1/012084/pdf
Begonia isoptera is used by indigenous peoples in Borneo and has profoundly important medicinal properties
This Begonia species found in Borneo has been used by indigenous peoples for aeons for medicinal purposes. A study from 2011 has found that this begonia species has positive antimicrobial and antibacterial effects on the human body.
[Pictured] Begonia Isoptera in Hiroshima Botanical Gardens 2008
Read more: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
Indonesia’s native plants: A medicine cabinet of powerful drugs growing in the rainforest
Indigenous peoples in Indonesia have been using native medicinal plants from their medicine cabinet – the rainforest for 1000’s of years. These medicines are influenced by Indian Ayurveda since Hinduism spread from India to Asia.
[Pictured]: Dyak/Dayak peoples in Borneo have a rich knowledge of ancient plant medicine that is recognised by western science. Images from PxFuel, creative commons.
Indigenous treatments using plants involve a combination of physical and spiritual aspects to form a holistic approach to healing.
The inclusion of indigenous medicinal plants not found in India enhanced Indigenous Indonesian medication. This was further enriched by the influence of Chinese and Arabian traders to the islands.
Dayak indigenous peoples of Borneo are knowledge-keepers of ancient indigenous medicine and treatment from plants. This knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. Now western medicine is realising just how important it is to keep these plants from going extinct. Research shows that these plants may hold the key to unlocking fatal diseases like dementia and cancer, as well as being useful for treating common illnesses and injuries.
Dayak Indigenous Ethnographer Dr Setia Budhi: In His Own WordsMost of this indigenous knowledge of medicine is not recorded. It is passed down verbally in stories from generation to generation and healer to healer.
Interview with Dr Budhi Short story by Dr Budhi“For Dayak peoples in Borneo, the land is mother, where they plant fruit, vegetables and grains for their families. The soil is mother where trees grow and develop.
“From these trees they harvest an abundance of creeping rattan for medicine, food and crafts.
“The forest has a ritual function, a medicinal function and a family protection function.”
Dr Setia Budhi, Dayak Ethnographer.
Historically, Dutch colonialists of Indonesia incorporated elements of indigenous medicine into their treatments, due to lack of availability of western medicine from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Medical texts from this period show that physicians found traditional medicines to be legitimate and effective in treating common illnesses. These publications include:
- De medicina Indorum by Bontius in 1642
- The Ambonese herbal by Rumphius in 1741
- Materia Indica by van der Burg in 1885
- De nuttige planten van Nederlansch Indie by Heyne in 1927
- Select Indonesian medicinal plants by Steenis Kruseman in 1953
- The Medical Journal of the Dutch East-Indies (1894- 1925)
[Pictured] Dutch colonialists overseeing the local workers in a warehouse in Deli Medan North Sumatra, 1897. www.nationaalarchief.nl
Since the 1970’s, the use of lab-based equipment, technology and computational modelling has revealed the remarkable properties of Indonesian rainforest plants, which have anti-viral, anti-malarial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents within them.
Read more
The wonder drugs of the rainforest: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications.
Professor Budiman Minasny; ‘The dark history of slavery and racism in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period’ (2020), University of Sydney, The Conversation.
This is what stands to be lost if more rainforests are destroyed for timber and palm oil in SE Asia, Papua, Africa and South America
“I can’t only be a begonia collector/grower anymore. Boycotts work to shift brands to act when governments fail to act” ~ Mel Lumby
Please join me and a growing number of people around the world who love nature, rainforests, animals and plants and who make an effort daily to push back against the corrupt and greedy people funded by the palm oil industry to spread greenwashing misinformation about “sustainable” palm oil.
Together we can use our wallets as weapons, #Boycottpalmoil and #Boycott4Wildlife” ~ Mel Lumby
Join the #Boycott4WildlifeBegonias in blossom by Freepix
Borneo is in great danger of being destroyed by deforestation to plant palm oil plantations.
Other places as well: Papua New Guinea, The Amazon, African countries like Guinea. You have seen the news. Our world is in trouble.
There are places with undiscovered endemic plant species with very limited habitats being bulldozed, burned and cut down. Science hasn’t even found these plants! We chop down their only habitat before they get discovered!
Amazing new Begonia species are being discovered all the time in Borneo: Begonia baik, Begonia darthvaderiana, Begonia nothobarimensis. And on and on. Scientists are still finding new and wonderful species there.
It’s super easy to get into a nihilist mindset these days
“It is a struggle and depressing when one realises how everything in the natural world is set up to be used, abused and destroyed – simply for profit!
“We have all been through ‘some things’ these last few years, that’s for sure! I just focus, concentrate and keep going. When it all gets too much, I take a couple of days to chill. Then I begin again with campaigning against tropical deforestation and against palm oil.”
Mel Lumby
The regal and rare Begonia rajah
Begonia rajah is a species of flowering plant in the family Begoniaceae, native to Peninsular Malaysia. They typically have striking bronze leaves and contrasting green veins, and are best suited for terrariums.
Watercolour painting of Begonia rajah of an original wild-collected plant grown in the Botanic Gardens, Singapore via Singapore Botanic Gardens.Begonia coriacea is a species native to Indonesia
Begonia coriacea – Hooker – Curtis Botanical Magazine Bot. Mag. 78 t. 4676 (1852)Stinky meat flowers of Borneo: Rafflesia arnoldii & Rafflesia pricei
Rafflesia pricei by Rimbawan on Getty Images Rafflesia arnoldsii by Boris 25 on Getty ImagesBorneo is also home to the largest flower in the world, Rafflesia arnoldii. They along with their relatives, are parasites, living their entire lives inside of tropical vines. These amazing plants only ever emerge when it is time to flower and flower they do! Their superficial resemblance to a rotting carcass goes much deeper than looks alone. These flowers give off a fetid odour of rotting flesh that is proportional to their size, but not to their visual beauty. This aroma has earned them the nickname “carrion flowers.”
12 new species of begonia were found on Sarawak in 2022
Different species of Begonia by Botanicus http://www.botanicus.orgTwelve new species and one new record of Begonia (Begoniaceae) from Sarawak, Malaysia, are described. All species belong to Begonia sect. Petermannia. Three species are recorded from Totally Protected Areas, one species occurs both within and outside Totally Protected Areas, and eight species occur only outside Totally Protected Areas.
Edinburgh Journal of Botany, Begonia special issue, Article 410: 1–46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.24823/EJB.2022.410.
“Polka-dotted. Striped. Furry. Shiny. Bumpy. Ferny. Maple-shaped. Elm-shaped. Grass-shaped. Black, silver, pink, mossy green and bright apple green leaf colors. Reds and oranges, too. Some will shine in the deep forest, with a beautiful blue sheen. The variety of Begonias is incredible!”
Mel Lumby
If you can successfully grow a Darth Vader Begonia – consider yourself a badass
Begonia darthvaderiana
- Discovered in 2013 by C.W. Lin, S.W. Chung and C.I. Peng and found in Sarawak, Borneo and found in shaded valleys, streams and slopes.
- Not a beginners begonia, this one is challenging to grow. They need a humid terrarium environment. Even then, their leaves are prone to ‘melting’ if temperatures, humidity waver too much from what they like.
- This beautiful species has a cane-like habit, olive black leaves and red colouring underneath, with a white to lime green edging.
[Pictured] Begonia Darthvaderiana By Lya Solis Blog
Begonia amphioxus: Polka-dotted princess
- Begonia amphioxus was discovered in 1984 growing on a limestone hill of Batu Punggul in Sabah, Borneo.
- Their red polka dots, bizarre and narrow leaves and pointed at both ends give this species an unusual look.
- This delicate looking begonia not only has aesthetic appeal but also commercial value and are highly collectable by plant hobbyists.
- They love high humidity and require a terrarium to grow. Once happy they will produce tiny white flowers.
- Threats in the wild include timber logging, palm oil, mining and quarrying for limestone and marble. Fires, droughts and extreme weather due to climate change along with tourist activities.
[Pictured] Begonia amphioxus by Lya Solis Blog
Every animal species in Borneo relies on native plants, including humans! So it’s about time we look after Borneo’s plants – because they look after us all!
Without direct intervention in Borneo’s national parks to protect plants and animals: Everyone from orchids and orangutans, begonias and binturongs will go extinct!
[Pictured] A critically endangered Sumatran orangutan by Craig Jones Wildlife Photography
When wildlife photographer and photojournalist Craig Jones visited Sumatra, Indonesia he found protected rainforests being destroyed by multinational palm oil companies – under the greenwashing guise of “sustainable” RSPO palm oil.
Craig Jones in his own words Eyewitness: Orangutans are rescued from an RSPO plantationHere are some other ways you can help by using your wallet as a weapon and joining the #Boycott4Wildlife
Why join the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Greenwashing Tactic #4: Fake Labels
The Counterpunch: Consumer Solutions To Fight Extinction
Did you enjoy visiting this website?
Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-FiPhotography: Craig Jones Wildlife Photography, Wikipedia, Getty Images, PXFuel.
Words: Mel Lumby, Palm Oil Detectives, Dr Setia Budhi, Craig Jones.
Did you enjoy visiting this website?
Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-Fi#Borneo #Botany #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #Dayak #deforestation #endangeredPlants #flora #indigenousMedicine #indigenousRights #investigativeJournalism #journalism #Malaysia #PalmOil #palmOilDeforestation #plants #wildlife #wildlifeActivism
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Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Retired Horticulturalist Mel Lumby: In Her Own Words
The beautiful begonias of Borneo and beyond deserve our love and protection
Bio: Mel Lumby
Hello, I’m Melody Lumby from the US state of Oregon. Throughout my career and life (over 50 years) I have been a passionate devotee of plants and a horticulturalist. Prior to retiring, I was a horticultural buyer for a retail nursery business and a lab technician in a horticultural laboratory, testing soil amendments and soil media for quality assurance.
I have always loved Begonias. I have loved them since falling for them at age 16 when I joined the American Begonia Society in Portland, Oregon – I am still a member!
When I first joined, it was me and a bevvy of sweet grannies and together we gathered to discuss and marvel over these plants.
Now after 50 years of living with, working with and loving begonias – I’m the one with the grey hair!
I’ve seen begonias go in and out of fashion over this time.
“Oh, yes. Begonias are a little old lady plant,” they used to say….now look at them!
Begonias are no longer citizens of Dorkville. They are coveted and collected by the hip and ‘planty’
Begonias are greatly coveted by hobbyists and are shown off on social media by hip and ‘planty’ enthusiasts.
I used to pay around $3.99 USD for certain begonias. Now? Some folks will pay $399 USD for unusual and desirable species of Begonia. Sometimes it can be even more expensive than that.
Begonias have been with me through the decades, a lovely silent friend to come home to after work, during life’s trials and joys, a beautiful accompaniment to a happy life.
~ Mel Lumby
Hidden in the jungles of SE Asia, scientists estimate that there are undiscovered begonia species to the tune of three to five hundred new species on Papua New Guinea. They occupy shady forest floors and limestone cliffs, without any name given by human kind. Horticultural commerce hasn’t had a glimpse of them yet.
On Borneo, it is estimated that 400 possibly even more species of Begonia exist – primarily in the under surveyed Kalimantan district.
Begonias, along with orangutans and many other rainforest inhabitants are in danger now. Will these precious jewels of the jungle be located by scientists, described, eventually named and shared, so that people can love and marvel at their incredible beauty? Or will the bulldozer get there first, destroying where they live, making way to plant oil palm plantations for cheap palm oil?
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)Come on an enchanting and curious journey into of the world’s most beautiful, medicinal and endangered plants of the rainforest: #Begonias with retired horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil
Will exquisite #begonias become historical relics…no longer found in real life #rainforests? Not if Begonia lover Mel Lumby @Norska11 has anything to do with it! Help her fight for rare plants #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
Download image Download printable PDF View interactive HTMLBeautiful #begonias are the unsung heroes of #rainforests. Their supreme beauty dazzles us. Their medicine protects us. Yet #corporate greed threatens them. By Horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
We buy inexpensive products that contain palm oil now. It is a cheap, useful, oil that manufacturers like to use. Cookies, crackers, frozen pizza, shampoo, face lotion.
We buy these products without realising that we are contributing to rainforest destruction. Those rainforest shady places where beautiful Begonias grow are vulnerable to deforestation for palmoil.
“We are destroying swathes of rainforest containing beautiful, jewel-like, treasures. I cannot sit by quietly, while our beautiful earth burns. I must act!”
Mel Lumby on Instagram: More begonias being carefully, lovingly grownMel Lumby’s Begonia moysesii in bloom Mel Lumby’s Instagram: Evey Big Buff and Eloise Little Miss, two of my buddies hanging out in the garden bed.“I thought that I would quietly retire at the beach, grow a flower garden and happily live out my days with my chickens. I have done this. But I cannot be silent. I am now adding my voice to many others who are trying to save the animals and plants we love from mass extinction. I am only one person, but I can do something.”
Mel lumby
Photos: Mel Lumby on Instagram @spock_like_object
“I am able to help fight against the greed of palm oil. This feels so good!”
Palm Oil and Pollution by Jo FrederiksThis issue has been on my mind for quite some time now.
It really bothers me that there are beautiful undiscovered begonias that took millions of years to evolve.
We won’t even get to know about them because of dumb old palm oil!
Nobody even asked for this in our food, etc. The Palm Oil Detectives gal is really a cool person – it is an honour to try to help her.
~ Mel Lumby
Deforestation for agriculture is a clear and present threat to tropical rainforests. Especially in Indonesia and Malaysia, economic growth has come at an enormous cost to its unique plants, wild animals and indigenous peoples.
In Indonesia, 10 million hectares of primary forest was lost over the past two decades. A 2019 study identified palm oil plantations to be responsible for 23% (the single largest proportion) of the deforestation in Indonesia between 2001 and 2016.
Over 3 million hectares of the forest estate in 2019 were allocated to palm oil production, which was in strict violation of national forestry law.
It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying to see. Now palm oil threatens plants, animals and indigenous peoples in South America, India, Papua and Africa as well.
Learn how to helpFast facts about Borneo & plant diversity
Borneo is home to more than 15,000 plant species
A diversity that rivals the African continent. This may be the highest number of plants of any region on Earth.
- There are 931 Begonia species in Southeast Asia
- Currently, there are 216 species and one subspecies of Begonia in Borneo.
- In Sarawak alone there are 96 species, with an average of at least 10 species described per year over the past 7 years.
- In Borneo, there are also 3,000 species of trees, 1,700 species of orchids and 50 carnivorous pitcher plant species.
The natural habitat of begonias is cool, moist forests and tropical rainforests, but some begonias are adapted to drier climates
[Pictured] Begonia socotrana grows in between the shady cracks in rock formations on the arid island of Socotra, Yemen.
Fast facts about the family Begoniaceae
They grow in the deeply shaded forest understory from the lowlands to mountain tops and on all rock types including granite, limestone, sandstone and ultramafic rocks.
A Guide to Begonias of Borneo by Ruth Kiew et. al.
- The Begonia was named after a French botanist in the 17th century.
- There are over 2,000 known species of family Begoniaceae – one of the largest genera of flowering plants. New species are being discovered almost on a monthly basis.
- They are mostly terrestrial and are either herbs or undershrubs, but occasionally may be grown from air (ephiphytic).
- They thrive in moist tropical and subtropical climates of South and Central America, Africa and southern Asia.
- Their leaves are often large, vividly marked and are they are assymetrical and unequal-sided, giving each plant unique beauty.
- They are popular ornamental plants for conservatories. Currently, begonias are incredibly trendy and are coveted and admired by house plant lovers all over the world.
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)
The world’s tiniest begonia was recently discovered Begonia elachista.
They exist at the mouth of a limestone cave in central Peru and nowhere else in the world.
Then there is a newly described giant begonia from Tibet, tall enough to tower over a person: Begonia giganticaulis.
The pretty Florist’s Reiger Begonia comes in a fantastic array of colours including pinks, peaches, oranges, reds, yellows, white.
We cannot forget the lovely tuberous begonias that we plant in the shady reaches of our yards.
To plant large flowerbeds full of Wax begonias in summertime is a sheer delight.
During drought periods, Begonia socotrana drop their pretty, round, leaves and survive as a tuber.
Many years ago, Begonia socotrana was used as one of the parent plants to eventually create Florist’s Reiger Begonia mentioned above.
Mel Lumby
Exceptionally beautiful begonia paintings from history
Those lovely plants are there, for now, surrounded by tropical bird call and orangutan hoots. They often live in very small stretches of area, sometimes only existing on one hillside and nowhere else in the world. Plants can’t run away if that bulldozer comes, they are sessile, fixed in one place.
If a bulldozer razes everything and scrapes that Begonia inhabited hillside bare, that’s it – that particular begonia will be lost, gone forever from our earth in the wild. Millions of years of evolution, gone. All that beauty, gone.
Mel Lumby
[Pictured] ‘Diversity of Species in the Rainforest by Oro Verde – the Rainforest Foundation (2009).
Scientists are constantly discovering new Begonia species in Indonesia
Indonesia has one of the largest concentrations of of begonia species diversity, especially in Southeast Asia with 243 species. In 2022 alone, at least a dozen new species were discovered, here in this article below, seven are mentioned.
- Hoya batutikarensis
- Hoya buntokensis
- Dendrobium dedeksantosoi
- Rigiolepis argentii
- Begonia robii
- Begonia willemii
- Etlingera comosa
Read the full story: ‘Indonesian researchers discover seven new species of ornamental plants,’ Indonesian Window.
Indonesia is an archipelago consisting of approximately 17,508 islands and is covered by tropical rain forest, seasonal forest, mountain vegetation, subalpine shrub vegetation, swamp and coastal vegetation. With its reflective mixture of Asian and Australian native species,
Indonesia is said to possess the second largest biodiversity
in the world, with around 40,000 endemic plant species
including 6,000 medicinal plantsNugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
We may be losing plants with medicinal purposes and cures as yet unknown which will help humankind
If we bulldoze Borneo, plow down Papua New Guinea, annihilate the Amazon, we wipe out incredibly beautiful plants that haven’t yet been discovered!
It isn’t just Begonias. It’s orchids and all sorts of fascinating tropical plant species. Nepenthes, the pitcher plant species. Aroids – the wonderful Philodendron relatives of Begonias that are also popular now.
Mel Lumby
Newly discovered Begonia medicinalis has cancer-fighting properties
Begonia medicinalis was discovered only recently in 2019 by scientists. This incredible species of begonia native to Sulawesi has been used as a medicinal plant by Indigenous peoples for 1000’s of years. Now this plant has been shown to have the potential to fight cancer!
Begonia medicinalis is known as benalu batu in Bahasa Indonesia is a herbal plant that is locally used for traditional medicines. The secondary metabolites such as flavonoids, alkaloids, steroids, and terpenoids have been reported to be found in these plant extracts. The content of flavonoids can lead to anti-cancer abilities while heat-sensitive flavonoid compounds can be extracted by the Ultrasound-assisted Extraction (UAE) method.
In this study, the anticancer potential of B. medicinalis extracts from the leaves (leaves extract/LE) and stem (stem extract/SE) in three cell lines (Hela, MDA-MB, HT-29) have been performed.
The anticancer potential was obtained from cytotoxic measurements by the MTT method on 3 types of cancer cells incubated with the extract for 24 hours. The value of total flavonoid content (TFC) in the LE was higher than that of SE extracts. Both extracts have the potential as a remedy for the treatment of cancer.
Prihardina & S Fatmawati; (2021); ‘Cytotoxicity of Begonia medicinalis aqueous extract in three cancer cell line,’: IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 913 012084. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/913/1/012084/pdf
Begonia isoptera is used by indigenous peoples in Borneo and has profoundly important medicinal properties
This Begonia species found in Borneo has been used by indigenous peoples for aeons for medicinal purposes. A study from 2011 has found that this begonia species has positive antimicrobial and antibacterial effects on the human body.
[Pictured] Begonia Isoptera in Hiroshima Botanical Gardens 2008
Read more: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
Indonesia’s native plants: A medicine cabinet of powerful drugs growing in the rainforest
Indigenous peoples in Indonesia have been using native medicinal plants from their medicine cabinet – the rainforest for 1000’s of years. These medicines are influenced by Indian Ayurveda since Hinduism spread from India to Asia.
[Pictured]: Dyak/Dayak peoples in Borneo have a rich knowledge of ancient plant medicine that is recognised by western science. Images from PxFuel, creative commons.
Indigenous treatments using plants involve a combination of physical and spiritual aspects to form a holistic approach to healing.
The inclusion of indigenous medicinal plants not found in India enhanced Indigenous Indonesian medication. This was further enriched by the influence of Chinese and Arabian traders to the islands.
Dayak indigenous peoples of Borneo are knowledge-keepers of ancient indigenous medicine and treatment from plants. This knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. Now western medicine is realising just how important it is to keep these plants from going extinct. Research shows that these plants may hold the key to unlocking fatal diseases like dementia and cancer, as well as being useful for treating common illnesses and injuries.
Dayak Indigenous Ethnographer Dr Setia Budhi: In His Own WordsMost of this indigenous knowledge of medicine is not recorded. It is passed down verbally in stories from generation to generation and healer to healer.
Interview with Dr Budhi Short story by Dr Budhi“For Dayak peoples in Borneo, the land is mother, where they plant fruit, vegetables and grains for their families. The soil is mother where trees grow and develop.
“From these trees they harvest an abundance of creeping rattan for medicine, food and crafts.
“The forest has a ritual function, a medicinal function and a family protection function.”
Dr Setia Budhi, Dayak Ethnographer.
Historically, Dutch colonialists of Indonesia incorporated elements of indigenous medicine into their treatments, due to lack of availability of western medicine from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Medical texts from this period show that physicians found traditional medicines to be legitimate and effective in treating common illnesses. These publications include:
- De medicina Indorum by Bontius in 1642
- The Ambonese herbal by Rumphius in 1741
- Materia Indica by van der Burg in 1885
- De nuttige planten van Nederlansch Indie by Heyne in 1927
- Select Indonesian medicinal plants by Steenis Kruseman in 1953
- The Medical Journal of the Dutch East-Indies (1894- 1925)
[Pictured] Dutch colonialists overseeing the local workers in a warehouse in Deli Medan North Sumatra, 1897. www.nationaalarchief.nl
Since the 1970’s, the use of lab-based equipment, technology and computational modelling has revealed the remarkable properties of Indonesian rainforest plants, which have anti-viral, anti-malarial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents within them.
Read more
The wonder drugs of the rainforest: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications.
Professor Budiman Minasny; ‘The dark history of slavery and racism in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period’ (2020), University of Sydney, The Conversation.
This is what stands to be lost if more rainforests are destroyed for timber and palm oil in SE Asia, Papua, Africa and South America
“I can’t only be a begonia collector/grower anymore. Boycotts work to shift brands to act when governments fail to act” ~ Mel Lumby
Please join me and a growing number of people around the world who love nature, rainforests, animals and plants and who make an effort daily to push back against the corrupt and greedy people funded by the palm oil industry to spread greenwashing misinformation about “sustainable” palm oil.
Together we can use our wallets as weapons, #Boycottpalmoil and #Boycott4Wildlife” ~ Mel Lumby
Join the #Boycott4WildlifeBegonias in blossom by Freepix
Borneo is in great danger of being destroyed by deforestation to plant palm oil plantations.
Other places as well: Papua New Guinea, The Amazon, African countries like Guinea. You have seen the news. Our world is in trouble.
There are places with undiscovered endemic plant species with very limited habitats being bulldozed, burned and cut down. Science hasn’t even found these plants! We chop down their only habitat before they get discovered!
Amazing new Begonia species are being discovered all the time in Borneo: Begonia baik, Begonia darthvaderiana, Begonia nothobarimensis. And on and on. Scientists are still finding new and wonderful species there.
It’s super easy to get into a nihilist mindset these days
“It is a struggle and depressing when one realises how everything in the natural world is set up to be used, abused and destroyed – simply for profit!
“We have all been through ‘some things’ these last few years, that’s for sure! I just focus, concentrate and keep going. When it all gets too much, I take a couple of days to chill. Then I begin again with campaigning against tropical deforestation and against palm oil.”
Mel Lumby
The regal and rare Begonia rajah
Begonia rajah is a species of flowering plant in the family Begoniaceae, native to Peninsular Malaysia. They typically have striking bronze leaves and contrasting green veins, and are best suited for terrariums.
Watercolour painting of Begonia rajah of an original wild-collected plant grown in the Botanic Gardens, Singapore via Singapore Botanic Gardens.Begonia coriacea is a species native to Indonesia
Begonia coriacea – Hooker – Curtis Botanical Magazine Bot. Mag. 78 t. 4676 (1852)Stinky meat flowers of Borneo: Rafflesia arnoldii & Rafflesia pricei
Rafflesia pricei by Rimbawan on Getty Images Rafflesia arnoldsii by Boris 25 on Getty ImagesBorneo is also home to the largest flower in the world, Rafflesia arnoldii. They along with their relatives, are parasites, living their entire lives inside of tropical vines. These amazing plants only ever emerge when it is time to flower and flower they do! Their superficial resemblance to a rotting carcass goes much deeper than looks alone. These flowers give off a fetid odour of rotting flesh that is proportional to their size, but not to their visual beauty. This aroma has earned them the nickname “carrion flowers.”
12 new species of begonia were found on Sarawak in 2022
Different species of Begonia by Botanicus http://www.botanicus.orgTwelve new species and one new record of Begonia (Begoniaceae) from Sarawak, Malaysia, are described. All species belong to Begonia sect. Petermannia. Three species are recorded from Totally Protected Areas, one species occurs both within and outside Totally Protected Areas, and eight species occur only outside Totally Protected Areas.
Edinburgh Journal of Botany, Begonia special issue, Article 410: 1–46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.24823/EJB.2022.410.
“Polka-dotted. Striped. Furry. Shiny. Bumpy. Ferny. Maple-shaped. Elm-shaped. Grass-shaped. Black, silver, pink, mossy green and bright apple green leaf colors. Reds and oranges, too. Some will shine in the deep forest, with a beautiful blue sheen. The variety of Begonias is incredible!”
Mel Lumby
If you can successfully grow a Darth Vader Begonia – consider yourself a badass
Begonia darthvaderiana
- Discovered in 2013 by C.W. Lin, S.W. Chung and C.I. Peng and found in Sarawak, Borneo and found in shaded valleys, streams and slopes.
- Not a beginners begonia, this one is challenging to grow. They need a humid terrarium environment. Even then, their leaves are prone to ‘melting’ if temperatures, humidity waver too much from what they like.
- This beautiful species has a cane-like habit, olive black leaves and red colouring underneath, with a white to lime green edging.
[Pictured] Begonia Darthvaderiana By Lya Solis Blog
Begonia amphioxus: Polka-dotted princess
- Begonia amphioxus was discovered in 1984 growing on a limestone hill of Batu Punggul in Sabah, Borneo.
- Their red polka dots, bizarre and narrow leaves and pointed at both ends give this species an unusual look.
- This delicate looking begonia not only has aesthetic appeal but also commercial value and are highly collectable by plant hobbyists.
- They love high humidity and require a terrarium to grow. Once happy they will produce tiny white flowers.
- Threats in the wild include timber logging, palm oil, mining and quarrying for limestone and marble. Fires, droughts and extreme weather due to climate change along with tourist activities.
[Pictured] Begonia amphioxus by Lya Solis Blog
Every animal species in Borneo relies on native plants, including humans! So it’s about time we look after Borneo’s plants – because they look after us all!
Without direct intervention in Borneo’s national parks to protect plants and animals: Everyone from orchids and orangutans, begonias and binturongs will go extinct!
[Pictured] A critically endangered Sumatran orangutan by Craig Jones Wildlife Photography
When wildlife photographer and photojournalist Craig Jones visited Sumatra, Indonesia he found protected rainforests being destroyed by multinational palm oil companies – under the greenwashing guise of “sustainable” RSPO palm oil.
Craig Jones in his own words Eyewitness: Orangutans are rescued from an RSPO plantationHere are some other ways you can help by using your wallet as a weapon and joining the #Boycott4Wildlife
Why join the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Greenwashing Tactic #4: Fake Labels
The Counterpunch: Consumer Solutions To Fight Extinction
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Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-FiPhotography: Craig Jones Wildlife Photography, Wikipedia, Getty Images, PXFuel.
Words: Mel Lumby, Palm Oil Detectives, Dr Setia Budhi, Craig Jones.
Did you enjoy visiting this website?
Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-Fi#Borneo #Botany #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #Dayak #deforestation #endangeredPlants #flora #indigenousMedicine #indigenousRights #investigativeJournalism #journalism #Malaysia #PalmOil #palmOilDeforestation #plants #wildlife #wildlifeActivism
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Mel Lumby: Dedicated Devotee to Borneo’s Living Beings
Retired Horticulturalist Mel Lumby: In Her Own Words
The beautiful begonias of Borneo and beyond deserve our love and protection
Bio: Mel Lumby
Hello, I’m Melody Lumby from the US state of Oregon. Throughout my career and life (over 50 years) I have been a passionate devotee of plants and a horticulturalist. Prior to retiring, I was a horticultural buyer for a retail nursery business and a lab technician in a horticultural laboratory, testing soil amendments and soil media for quality assurance.
I have always loved Begonias. I have loved them since falling for them at age 16 when I joined the American Begonia Society in Portland, Oregon – I am still a member!
When I first joined, it was me and a bevvy of sweet grannies and together we gathered to discuss and marvel over these plants.
Now after 50 years of living with, working with and loving begonias – I’m the one with the grey hair!
I’ve seen begonias go in and out of fashion over this time.
“Oh, yes. Begonias are a little old lady plant,” they used to say….now look at them!
Begonias are no longer citizens of Dorkville. They are coveted and collected by the hip and ‘planty’
Begonias are greatly coveted by hobbyists and are shown off on social media by hip and ‘planty’ enthusiasts.
I used to pay around $3.99 USD for certain begonias. Now? Some folks will pay $399 USD for unusual and desirable species of Begonia. Sometimes it can be even more expensive than that.
Begonias have been with me through the decades, a lovely silent friend to come home to after work, during life’s trials and joys, a beautiful accompaniment to a happy life.
~ Mel Lumby
Hidden in the jungles of SE Asia, scientists estimate that there are undiscovered begonia species to the tune of three to five hundred new species on Papua New Guinea. They occupy shady forest floors and limestone cliffs, without any name given by human kind. Horticultural commerce hasn’t had a glimpse of them yet.
On Borneo, it is estimated that 400 possibly even more species of Begonia exist – primarily in the under surveyed Kalimantan district.
Begonias, along with orangutans and many other rainforest inhabitants are in danger now. Will these precious jewels of the jungle be located by scientists, described, eventually named and shared, so that people can love and marvel at their incredible beauty? Or will the bulldozer get there first, destroying where they live, making way to plant oil palm plantations for cheap palm oil?
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)Come on an enchanting and curious journey into of the world’s most beautiful, medicinal and endangered plants of the rainforest: #Begonias with retired horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycott4Wildlife #Boycottpalmoil
Will exquisite #begonias become historical relics…no longer found in real life #rainforests? Not if Begonia lover Mel Lumby @Norska11 has anything to do with it! Help her fight for rare plants #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
Download image Download printable PDF View interactive HTMLBeautiful #begonias are the unsung heroes of #rainforests. Their supreme beauty dazzles us. Their medicine protects us. Yet #corporate greed threatens them. By Horticulturalist Mel Lumby @Norska11 #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife
We buy inexpensive products that contain palm oil now. It is a cheap, useful, oil that manufacturers like to use. Cookies, crackers, frozen pizza, shampoo, face lotion.
We buy these products without realising that we are contributing to rainforest destruction. Those rainforest shady places where beautiful Begonias grow are vulnerable to deforestation for palmoil.
“We are destroying swathes of rainforest containing beautiful, jewel-like, treasures. I cannot sit by quietly, while our beautiful earth burns. I must act!”
Mel Lumby on Instagram: More begonias being carefully, lovingly grownMel Lumby’s Begonia moysesii in bloom Mel Lumby’s Instagram: Evey Big Buff and Eloise Little Miss, two of my buddies hanging out in the garden bed.“I thought that I would quietly retire at the beach, grow a flower garden and happily live out my days with my chickens. I have done this. But I cannot be silent. I am now adding my voice to many others who are trying to save the animals and plants we love from mass extinction. I am only one person, but I can do something.”
Mel lumby
Photos: Mel Lumby on Instagram @spock_like_object
“I am able to help fight against the greed of palm oil. This feels so good!”
Palm Oil and Pollution by Jo FrederiksThis issue has been on my mind for quite some time now.
It really bothers me that there are beautiful undiscovered begonias that took millions of years to evolve.
We won’t even get to know about them because of dumb old palm oil!
Nobody even asked for this in our food, etc. The Palm Oil Detectives gal is really a cool person – it is an honour to try to help her.
~ Mel Lumby
Deforestation for agriculture is a clear and present threat to tropical rainforests. Especially in Indonesia and Malaysia, economic growth has come at an enormous cost to its unique plants, wild animals and indigenous peoples.
In Indonesia, 10 million hectares of primary forest was lost over the past two decades. A 2019 study identified palm oil plantations to be responsible for 23% (the single largest proportion) of the deforestation in Indonesia between 2001 and 2016.
Over 3 million hectares of the forest estate in 2019 were allocated to palm oil production, which was in strict violation of national forestry law.
It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying to see. Now palm oil threatens plants, animals and indigenous peoples in South America, India, Papua and Africa as well.
Learn how to helpFast facts about Borneo & plant diversity
Borneo is home to more than 15,000 plant species
A diversity that rivals the African continent. This may be the highest number of plants of any region on Earth.
- There are 931 Begonia species in Southeast Asia
- Currently, there are 216 species and one subspecies of Begonia in Borneo.
- In Sarawak alone there are 96 species, with an average of at least 10 species described per year over the past 7 years.
- In Borneo, there are also 3,000 species of trees, 1,700 species of orchids and 50 carnivorous pitcher plant species.
The natural habitat of begonias is cool, moist forests and tropical rainforests, but some begonias are adapted to drier climates
[Pictured] Begonia socotrana grows in between the shady cracks in rock formations on the arid island of Socotra, Yemen.
Fast facts about the family Begoniaceae
They grow in the deeply shaded forest understory from the lowlands to mountain tops and on all rock types including granite, limestone, sandstone and ultramafic rocks.
A Guide to Begonias of Borneo by Ruth Kiew et. al.
- The Begonia was named after a French botanist in the 17th century.
- There are over 2,000 known species of family Begoniaceae – one of the largest genera of flowering plants. New species are being discovered almost on a monthly basis.
- They are mostly terrestrial and are either herbs or undershrubs, but occasionally may be grown from air (ephiphytic).
- They thrive in moist tropical and subtropical climates of South and Central America, Africa and southern Asia.
- Their leaves are often large, vividly marked and are they are assymetrical and unequal-sided, giving each plant unique beauty.
- They are popular ornamental plants for conservatories. Currently, begonias are incredibly trendy and are coveted and admired by house plant lovers all over the world.
[Pictured] Begonia Rex, National Gallery of Canada (1868)
The world’s tiniest begonia was recently discovered Begonia elachista.
They exist at the mouth of a limestone cave in central Peru and nowhere else in the world.
Then there is a newly described giant begonia from Tibet, tall enough to tower over a person: Begonia giganticaulis.
The pretty Florist’s Reiger Begonia comes in a fantastic array of colours including pinks, peaches, oranges, reds, yellows, white.
We cannot forget the lovely tuberous begonias that we plant in the shady reaches of our yards.
To plant large flowerbeds full of Wax begonias in summertime is a sheer delight.
During drought periods, Begonia socotrana drop their pretty, round, leaves and survive as a tuber.
Many years ago, Begonia socotrana was used as one of the parent plants to eventually create Florist’s Reiger Begonia mentioned above.
Mel Lumby
Exceptionally beautiful begonia paintings from history
Those lovely plants are there, for now, surrounded by tropical bird call and orangutan hoots. They often live in very small stretches of area, sometimes only existing on one hillside and nowhere else in the world. Plants can’t run away if that bulldozer comes, they are sessile, fixed in one place.
If a bulldozer razes everything and scrapes that Begonia inhabited hillside bare, that’s it – that particular begonia will be lost, gone forever from our earth in the wild. Millions of years of evolution, gone. All that beauty, gone.
Mel Lumby
[Pictured] ‘Diversity of Species in the Rainforest by Oro Verde – the Rainforest Foundation (2009).
Scientists are constantly discovering new Begonia species in Indonesia
Indonesia has one of the largest concentrations of of begonia species diversity, especially in Southeast Asia with 243 species. In 2022 alone, at least a dozen new species were discovered, here in this article below, seven are mentioned.
- Hoya batutikarensis
- Hoya buntokensis
- Dendrobium dedeksantosoi
- Rigiolepis argentii
- Begonia robii
- Begonia willemii
- Etlingera comosa
Read the full story: ‘Indonesian researchers discover seven new species of ornamental plants,’ Indonesian Window.
Indonesia is an archipelago consisting of approximately 17,508 islands and is covered by tropical rain forest, seasonal forest, mountain vegetation, subalpine shrub vegetation, swamp and coastal vegetation. With its reflective mixture of Asian and Australian native species,
Indonesia is said to possess the second largest biodiversity
in the world, with around 40,000 endemic plant species
including 6,000 medicinal plantsNugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
We may be losing plants with medicinal purposes and cures as yet unknown which will help humankind
If we bulldoze Borneo, plow down Papua New Guinea, annihilate the Amazon, we wipe out incredibly beautiful plants that haven’t yet been discovered!
It isn’t just Begonias. It’s orchids and all sorts of fascinating tropical plant species. Nepenthes, the pitcher plant species. Aroids – the wonderful Philodendron relatives of Begonias that are also popular now.
Mel Lumby
Newly discovered Begonia medicinalis has cancer-fighting properties
Begonia medicinalis was discovered only recently in 2019 by scientists. This incredible species of begonia native to Sulawesi has been used as a medicinal plant by Indigenous peoples for 1000’s of years. Now this plant has been shown to have the potential to fight cancer!
Begonia medicinalis is known as benalu batu in Bahasa Indonesia is a herbal plant that is locally used for traditional medicines. The secondary metabolites such as flavonoids, alkaloids, steroids, and terpenoids have been reported to be found in these plant extracts. The content of flavonoids can lead to anti-cancer abilities while heat-sensitive flavonoid compounds can be extracted by the Ultrasound-assisted Extraction (UAE) method.
In this study, the anticancer potential of B. medicinalis extracts from the leaves (leaves extract/LE) and stem (stem extract/SE) in three cell lines (Hela, MDA-MB, HT-29) have been performed.
The anticancer potential was obtained from cytotoxic measurements by the MTT method on 3 types of cancer cells incubated with the extract for 24 hours. The value of total flavonoid content (TFC) in the LE was higher than that of SE extracts. Both extracts have the potential as a remedy for the treatment of cancer.
Prihardina & S Fatmawati; (2021); ‘Cytotoxicity of Begonia medicinalis aqueous extract in three cancer cell line,’: IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 913 012084. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/913/1/012084/pdf
Begonia isoptera is used by indigenous peoples in Borneo and has profoundly important medicinal properties
This Begonia species found in Borneo has been used by indigenous peoples for aeons for medicinal purposes. A study from 2011 has found that this begonia species has positive antimicrobial and antibacterial effects on the human body.
[Pictured] Begonia Isoptera in Hiroshima Botanical Gardens 2008
Read more: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1934578X110060124
Indonesia’s native plants: A medicine cabinet of powerful drugs growing in the rainforest
Indigenous peoples in Indonesia have been using native medicinal plants from their medicine cabinet – the rainforest for 1000’s of years. These medicines are influenced by Indian Ayurveda since Hinduism spread from India to Asia.
[Pictured]: Dyak/Dayak peoples in Borneo have a rich knowledge of ancient plant medicine that is recognised by western science. Images from PxFuel, creative commons.
Indigenous treatments using plants involve a combination of physical and spiritual aspects to form a holistic approach to healing.
The inclusion of indigenous medicinal plants not found in India enhanced Indigenous Indonesian medication. This was further enriched by the influence of Chinese and Arabian traders to the islands.
Dayak indigenous peoples of Borneo are knowledge-keepers of ancient indigenous medicine and treatment from plants. This knowledge is passed down from generation to generation. Now western medicine is realising just how important it is to keep these plants from going extinct. Research shows that these plants may hold the key to unlocking fatal diseases like dementia and cancer, as well as being useful for treating common illnesses and injuries.
Dayak Indigenous Ethnographer Dr Setia Budhi: In His Own WordsMost of this indigenous knowledge of medicine is not recorded. It is passed down verbally in stories from generation to generation and healer to healer.
Interview with Dr Budhi Short story by Dr Budhi“For Dayak peoples in Borneo, the land is mother, where they plant fruit, vegetables and grains for their families. The soil is mother where trees grow and develop.
“From these trees they harvest an abundance of creeping rattan for medicine, food and crafts.
“The forest has a ritual function, a medicinal function and a family protection function.”
Dr Setia Budhi, Dayak Ethnographer.
Historically, Dutch colonialists of Indonesia incorporated elements of indigenous medicine into their treatments, due to lack of availability of western medicine from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Medical texts from this period show that physicians found traditional medicines to be legitimate and effective in treating common illnesses. These publications include:
- De medicina Indorum by Bontius in 1642
- The Ambonese herbal by Rumphius in 1741
- Materia Indica by van der Burg in 1885
- De nuttige planten van Nederlansch Indie by Heyne in 1927
- Select Indonesian medicinal plants by Steenis Kruseman in 1953
- The Medical Journal of the Dutch East-Indies (1894- 1925)
[Pictured] Dutch colonialists overseeing the local workers in a warehouse in Deli Medan North Sumatra, 1897. www.nationaalarchief.nl
Since the 1970’s, the use of lab-based equipment, technology and computational modelling has revealed the remarkable properties of Indonesian rainforest plants, which have anti-viral, anti-malarial, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents within them.
Read more
The wonder drugs of the rainforest: Nugraha, Ari S, et. al (2011) . ‘Revealing Indigenous Indonesian Traditional Medicine: Anti-infective Agents’, Natural Product Communications.
Professor Budiman Minasny; ‘The dark history of slavery and racism in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period’ (2020), University of Sydney, The Conversation.
This is what stands to be lost if more rainforests are destroyed for timber and palm oil in SE Asia, Papua, Africa and South America
“I can’t only be a begonia collector/grower anymore. Boycotts work to shift brands to act when governments fail to act” ~ Mel Lumby
Please join me and a growing number of people around the world who love nature, rainforests, animals and plants and who make an effort daily to push back against the corrupt and greedy people funded by the palm oil industry to spread greenwashing misinformation about “sustainable” palm oil.
Together we can use our wallets as weapons, #Boycottpalmoil and #Boycott4Wildlife” ~ Mel Lumby
Join the #Boycott4WildlifeBegonias in blossom by Freepix
Borneo is in great danger of being destroyed by deforestation to plant palm oil plantations.
Other places as well: Papua New Guinea, The Amazon, African countries like Guinea. You have seen the news. Our world is in trouble.
There are places with undiscovered endemic plant species with very limited habitats being bulldozed, burned and cut down. Science hasn’t even found these plants! We chop down their only habitat before they get discovered!
Amazing new Begonia species are being discovered all the time in Borneo: Begonia baik, Begonia darthvaderiana, Begonia nothobarimensis. And on and on. Scientists are still finding new and wonderful species there.
It’s super easy to get into a nihilist mindset these days
“It is a struggle and depressing when one realises how everything in the natural world is set up to be used, abused and destroyed – simply for profit!
“We have all been through ‘some things’ these last few years, that’s for sure! I just focus, concentrate and keep going. When it all gets too much, I take a couple of days to chill. Then I begin again with campaigning against tropical deforestation and against palm oil.”
Mel Lumby
The regal and rare Begonia rajah
Begonia rajah is a species of flowering plant in the family Begoniaceae, native to Peninsular Malaysia. They typically have striking bronze leaves and contrasting green veins, and are best suited for terrariums.
Watercolour painting of Begonia rajah of an original wild-collected plant grown in the Botanic Gardens, Singapore via Singapore Botanic Gardens.Begonia coriacea is a species native to Indonesia
Begonia coriacea – Hooker – Curtis Botanical Magazine Bot. Mag. 78 t. 4676 (1852)Stinky meat flowers of Borneo: Rafflesia arnoldii & Rafflesia pricei
Rafflesia pricei by Rimbawan on Getty Images Rafflesia arnoldsii by Boris 25 on Getty ImagesBorneo is also home to the largest flower in the world, Rafflesia arnoldii. They along with their relatives, are parasites, living their entire lives inside of tropical vines. These amazing plants only ever emerge when it is time to flower and flower they do! Their superficial resemblance to a rotting carcass goes much deeper than looks alone. These flowers give off a fetid odour of rotting flesh that is proportional to their size, but not to their visual beauty. This aroma has earned them the nickname “carrion flowers.”
12 new species of begonia were found on Sarawak in 2022
Different species of Begonia by Botanicus http://www.botanicus.orgTwelve new species and one new record of Begonia (Begoniaceae) from Sarawak, Malaysia, are described. All species belong to Begonia sect. Petermannia. Three species are recorded from Totally Protected Areas, one species occurs both within and outside Totally Protected Areas, and eight species occur only outside Totally Protected Areas.
Edinburgh Journal of Botany, Begonia special issue, Article 410: 1–46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.24823/EJB.2022.410.
“Polka-dotted. Striped. Furry. Shiny. Bumpy. Ferny. Maple-shaped. Elm-shaped. Grass-shaped. Black, silver, pink, mossy green and bright apple green leaf colors. Reds and oranges, too. Some will shine in the deep forest, with a beautiful blue sheen. The variety of Begonias is incredible!”
Mel Lumby
If you can successfully grow a Darth Vader Begonia – consider yourself a badass
Begonia darthvaderiana
- Discovered in 2013 by C.W. Lin, S.W. Chung and C.I. Peng and found in Sarawak, Borneo and found in shaded valleys, streams and slopes.
- Not a beginners begonia, this one is challenging to grow. They need a humid terrarium environment. Even then, their leaves are prone to ‘melting’ if temperatures, humidity waver too much from what they like.
- This beautiful species has a cane-like habit, olive black leaves and red colouring underneath, with a white to lime green edging.
[Pictured] Begonia Darthvaderiana By Lya Solis Blog
Begonia amphioxus: Polka-dotted princess
- Begonia amphioxus was discovered in 1984 growing on a limestone hill of Batu Punggul in Sabah, Borneo.
- Their red polka dots, bizarre and narrow leaves and pointed at both ends give this species an unusual look.
- This delicate looking begonia not only has aesthetic appeal but also commercial value and are highly collectable by plant hobbyists.
- They love high humidity and require a terrarium to grow. Once happy they will produce tiny white flowers.
- Threats in the wild include timber logging, palm oil, mining and quarrying for limestone and marble. Fires, droughts and extreme weather due to climate change along with tourist activities.
[Pictured] Begonia amphioxus by Lya Solis Blog
Every animal species in Borneo relies on native plants, including humans! So it’s about time we look after Borneo’s plants – because they look after us all!
Without direct intervention in Borneo’s national parks to protect plants and animals: Everyone from orchids and orangutans, begonias and binturongs will go extinct!
[Pictured] A critically endangered Sumatran orangutan by Craig Jones Wildlife Photography
When wildlife photographer and photojournalist Craig Jones visited Sumatra, Indonesia he found protected rainforests being destroyed by multinational palm oil companies – under the greenwashing guise of “sustainable” RSPO palm oil.
Craig Jones in his own words Eyewitness: Orangutans are rescued from an RSPO plantationHere are some other ways you can help by using your wallet as a weapon and joining the #Boycott4Wildlife
Why join the #Boycott4Wildlife?
Greenwashing Tactic #4: Fake Labels
The Counterpunch: Consumer Solutions To Fight Extinction
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Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-FiPhotography: Craig Jones Wildlife Photography, Wikipedia, Getty Images, PXFuel.
Words: Mel Lumby, Palm Oil Detectives, Dr Setia Budhi, Craig Jones.
Did you enjoy visiting this website?
Palm Oil Detectives is 100% self-funded
Palm Oil Detectives is completely self-funded by its creator. All hosting and website fees and investigations into brands are self-funded by the creator of this online movement. If you like what I am doing, you and would like me to help meet costs, please send Palm Oil Detectives a thanks on Ko-Fi.
Say thanks on Ko-Fi#Borneo #Botany #conservation #CreativesForCoolCreatures #Dayak #deforestation #endangeredPlants #flora #indigenousMedicine #indigenousRights #investigativeJournalism #journalism #Malaysia #PalmOil #palmOilDeforestation #plants #wildlife #wildlifeActivism
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Great resource for UX researchers and retro historians.
Cool to see UI docs pre-desktop publishing that aren't published books.
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@MissConstrue Sam Seder & Emma Vigeland discussed this on The Majority Report the other day.
Sam: Honestly, I don't want to kink shame the guy. (He thinks #Noem leaked it. )
Vigeland "If they weren't Republicans, we wouldn't make fun of this at all. Like they could have a lavender marriage & have her have her own thing outside of it & him do his thing. And they want to raise their kids together. That rocks."Being cool with Bryon's kink let's us focus on Kristi & Corey's real corruption.
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#KristiNoem will be a Special Envoy in Trump's The Shield of The Americas.
She reminds me of Daisy Johnson in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
She slept with her boss, had superpowers, a cool costume, a code name "Quake" & was known as Destroyer Of Worlds
Spoilers: Shield was infiltrated by Hydra!
#SciFiTV #Marvel #DHS #uspol -
#KristiNoem will be a Special Envoy in Trump's The Shield of The Americas.
She reminds me of Daisy Johnson in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
She slept with her boss, had superpowers, a cool costume, a code name "Quake" & was known as Destroyer Of Worlds
Spoilers: Shield was infiltrated by Hydra!
#SciFiTV #Marvel #DHS #uspol -
#KristiNoem will be a Special Envoy in Trump's The Shield of The Americas.
She reminds me of Daisy Johnson in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
She slept with her boss, had superpowers, a cool costume, a code name "Quake" & was known as Destroyer Of Worlds
Spoilers: Shield was infiltrated by Hydra!
#SciFiTV #Marvel #DHS #uspol -
#KristiNoem will be a Special Envoy in Trump's The Shield of The Americas.
She reminds me of Daisy Johnson in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
She slept with her boss, had superpowers, a cool costume, a code name "Quake" & was known as Destroyer Of Worlds
Spoilers: Shield was infiltrated by Hydra!
#SciFiTV #Marvel #DHS #uspol -
#KristiNoem will be a Special Envoy in Trump's The Shield of The Americas.
She reminds me of Daisy Johnson in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD.
She slept with her boss, had superpowers, a cool costume, a code name "Quake" & was known as Destroyer Of Worlds
Spoilers: Shield was infiltrated by Hydra!
#SciFiTV #Marvel #DHS #uspol -
This guy won! OMG. He speaks Arabic! It's tbe end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
#ZohranMamdani Wins! #Mamdan speaks Arabic. COOL. -
Das SailGP Team Germany um Skipper Erik Kosegarten-Heil schreibt Geschichte beim Grand Prix der Schweiz: Mit einem großartigen Auftritt in einem nervenzehrenden Sonntag auf dem Genfer See holt das deutsche Team den ersten eigenen Sieg in der Historie des Formel-1-Segelcircuits.
#ErikHeil #Genf #GenferSee #GermanySailGPTeam #SailGPhttps://floatmagazin.de/leute/amazing-shocking-cool-sailgp-sieg-fuer-germany/
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Why oil shock could cool inflation amid consumer cutbacks
Oil prices spiked once again on Monday morning, rebounding above $100 a barrel after Middle East peace talks…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Economy #@CL26K #@LCO26M #Business #businessnews #donaldtrump #InvescoDBOilFund #iran #iSharesGlobalEnergyETF #Islamabad #OilandGas #Prices #regwall-pro
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/581692/